Afghan Taliban force phone network shutdown (News Feature)

By Farhad Peikar May 7, 2010, 5:32 GMT

Kunduz, Afghanistan - In the northern Afghan province of Kunduz, mobile phone companies have been shutting down their networks from dusk to dawn to avoid Taliban attacks on their staff, officials and locals said.

For the past 10 days the mobile phones in Kunduz city and surrounding districts go dead as all four companies operating in the province turn off their antennas and return on air only when the sun rises, Khosh Mohammad, a member of the provincial council, said.

'There is no connectivity from 6 pm to 6 am every day,' Mohammad told the German Press Agency dpa.

Sherin Agha, a resident of Kunduz city, said that shutdown was felt more if there was an emergency and they could not contact a doctor or an ambulance. 'We have a lot of problems during the night.'

The reason behind the nightly blackout was a decree by the Taliban aimed at preventing locals from passing information regarding their whereabouts to foreign forces.

NATO is also said to track down militants through their mobile phone signals.

The order shows the growing influence of the militant group in the region, which until three years ago was more peaceful than southern and eastern provinces.

'The decision was made because of security reasons,' Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told dpa by phone from an undisclosed location.

'The enemies of Afghanistan and the occupiers always try to use phone tracking against the people and find out their locations,' he said. 'In order to foil the enemies' plots and for security of our people and since the risk is higher during the night, we have asked the telephone companies to cooperate.'

The phone companies ignored the warnings at the beginning, but immediately fell into line when four antennas were blown up in the province in the past two weeks, company officials and provincial authorities said.

'We try to reach to people in all corners of the country and of course when the government cannot protect our staff and our equipment, we have no option but to comply with their demands,' said an official from one of the companies who declined to be named.

A similar nightly blackout has been imposed for the past three years in eastern and southern provinces, where the militants are most active. When the mobile companies refused to obey, their personnel were killed and their towers destroyed.

'One antenna with its other necessary equipment cost nearly half a million dollars, but for us it is the lives of our staff that are more important which are at stake,' another telecommunication official said.

He said that all the major phone companies have jointly made a decision to shut down networks in Taliban-controlled areas, or where the militants asked them to.

However, the Taliban does not see telecom firms as its main targets, because the militants use mobile phones for their internal communications to remotely detonate roadside bombs and other types of explosives. They also know that banning the service in the entire country would provoke a public backlash.

By intimidating the phone industry, one of the most lucrative and successful post-Taliban businesses in the country, the militants are trying to show that who is really in charge in certain parts of the country, analysts said.

Officials also said that the Taliban also try to extract large amounts of money from the phone companies by allowing them to install towers in militant-held areas, cash that is then used in the insurgency.

'I think by shutting the phones, one of the Taliban's objectives maybe is to get money from the phone companies' Kunduz lawmaker Mohammad said.

Kunduz police chief Mohammad Razaq Yaqoubi admitted that the nightly blackout has created problems for the government and residents.

'If the Taliban and al-Qaeda think that by shutting off the phone companies, the government's activities against them will be stopped or slowed down, then they are mistaken,' he said, adding the government could use other high-tech gadgets to track down militants.

The recent Taliban show of power in the north comes amid preparations by Afghan troops and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force for major operations in the southern province of Kandahar and its neighbouring provinces.